One afternoon in 1997, while World Bank senior financial analyst Margaret Hanson Costan was in Paris discussing donations to the Bank, her husband, Jay, got a phone call. The social worker with whom they had been working to adopt a baby had found them a newborn in Florida. Three days later, the couple met their new son, Jonathan. While they had been discussing adoption for two years, the reality of taking care of a five-day-old infant was overwhelming. “It really hit me then what we were getting ourselves into,” Costan admits. “I was terrified.”

Today, while four-year-old Jonathan keeps his parents busy, they are delighted with the rewards and responsibilities of raising a child. The energetic preschooler offers a very different set of challenges for Costan than did the World Bank, where she’d spent a decade working on energy projects, setting up loans for microenterprises in the developing world, and fundraising for the Bank. “My whole life used to be about efficiency,” says Costan, a Montana native who graduated from Stanford and studied theology at Oxford prior to attending HBS. “That’s not really possible when raising a child.”

The love she feels for Jonathan, however, is even greater than she’d imagined. A spiritual, pensive person, Costan lists her most satisfying moments as those when she is watching Jonathan interact with other kids, getting to know the other mothers and fathers in the neighborhood, playing ball in their backyard, and attending church. It was at Christ Church in Washington’s Georgetown section, in fact, where she met Jay when they both signed up to volunteer in a soup kitchen. After marrying in 1991 and several years of trying to have a child, they came to the conclusion that adoption was their best option. “In a dream one night, I realized that we needed to look into other ways of becoming parents,” she recalls. “It hadn’t occurred to me earlier that we had a choice.”

Having extended her maternity leave into a long-term leave of absence from the Bank, Costan has spent the last four years as a full-time mother who frequently puts her management skills to work for good causes. She helped a health-care start-up with its finances, served on the board of directors of a local choral group, and is the senior warden (head of Vestry) at Christ Church. She is also renovating the 1805 Georgetown home that she and Jay, a lawyer, bought five years ago.

As Jonathan gets older and begins to spend more time at school, Costan is considering her next move. Soft-spoken and down-to-earth, she is comfortable admitting that she is uncertain about her future. While her HBS education and career experience have armed her with numerous skills, she is also interested in returning to one of her original interests: theology. At Oxford, she decided not to pursue a Ph.D. because she wasn’t interested in becoming an academic, but now she is considering a more practical approach to the topic. “I haven’t ruled out becoming a minister,” she says with a shy smile. Whatever path Margaret Hanson Costan chooses to go down, it is certain to be a meaningful journey.

— Susan Young